How Ursa Major Is Advancing Propulsion for Aerospace and Defense

For years, propulsion technologies have enabled humanity to reach new frontiers by flying through the skies and exploring space. However, despite the importance of this cornerstone technology, its advancement has not been propelled to the forefront. Instead, propulsion has become a bottleneck in which demand exceeds the supply.

This challenge is conflated by the fact that propulsion technology is widely known to be costly, complex, and prone to causing launch failures, leading to hesitancy in making large changes to existing propulsion techniques and technologies.

It is within this environment that Ursa Major comes onto the scene. Ursa Major aims to power the future of defense and aerospace by providing advanced propulsion systems. To achieve this, the company has committed to leaving the tried and true behind by pushing hardware to its limits and iterating quickly to achieve much-needed advancements and innovations in propulsion. In doing so, the company is able to produce high-performance propulsion systems for commercial space, defense applications, and more.

“Ursa Major's mission and vision has always been to develop propulsion,” says Bill Murray, chief engineering officer. “The idea has been that propulsion is a very expensive endeavor and requires a lot of expertise and knowledge. So, by condensing a lot of propulsion capabilities and expertise under one roof, you can reap the benefits of economies of scale.”

This strategy helps Ursa Major stand out. “Ursa Major is unique because we have experts in all the different disciplines that we're working in,” says Louis Villa, responsible engineer.

As part of this unique business model, Ursa Major also aims to move quickly and is OK with not getting a perfect solution every time. Instead, its goal is to reach an 80% solution, says development engineer Travis Thyes. With this approach, “after each test, we can go back and dissect what the learnings were, and we can continually roll those improvements into better and better products,” Thyes says.

Ursa Major’s multidisciplinary team and targeted approaches have led to innovations in propulsion technology that have the potential to power mission success across industries.

Exploring Ursa Major’s Propulsion Technologies

Ursa Major aims to help its partners by providing high-performance, competitively priced, and innovative turnkey rocket engines. To do so, the company relies on additive manufacturing (AM) to enable quick iteration, part commonality, modular production, surge readiness, and shorter build timelines. It uses a high-performance yet inexpensive oxygen-rich staged combustion cycle, performs extensive testing for reliability and performance, and prioritizes building reusable products.

Ursa Major also tailors its designs for multiple applications and engine sizes. This versatility results in several high-performing engine configurations:

• Draper: a flexible liquid engine with storability that matches a solid motor
• Hadley: the first oxygen-rich staged combustion engine produced in America
• Solid Rocket Motors: Ursa Major’s solid rocket motors are additively manufactured and production-ready for all domains.

Using the benefits of these propulsion systems, customers across multiple sectors can achieve mission success.

The defense industry stands to benefit greatly from this technology. “Ursa Major sees itself as the cutting-edge development arm of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) right now,” says Murray. This collaborative relationship helps accelerate the company’s design process and create usable defense solutions for a wide range of missions.

Ursa Major is also helping drive progress in the space domain with satellite propulsion. Here, the company’s propulsion technology can enable reliable launch and in-orbit maneuverability solutions. For example, Ursa Major is developing a modular hydrazine in-space propulsion system that offers customized degrees of freedom for satellite control.

“At this point in the company's evolution, we're at a great point to start branching out into actual missions across a huge variety of spaces, commercial and defense,” says Murray. This progress comes with a few hurdles that Ursa Major is actively working to overcome.

Propulsion Challenges Faced by Ursa Major

At its core, propulsion is a challenging field. “Rocket engines are some of the most power-dense machines ever built by man,” says Murray. “What that means in practice is that every component of a rocket engine is stretched to its limits.”

The Ursa Major team is tasked with achieving the maximum performance possible from each part of its designs to achieve mission goals. At the same time, the team needs to consider factors like minimizing weight, reducing costs, and designing for reusability.

These challenges are heightened by Ursa Major’s goal to move rapidly. “We have to put a lot of effort into developing highly reliable and very effective products quickly,” says Villa. “It’s all about figuring out the intelligent shortcuts you can take to make sure that you're getting the best product to market as quickly as possible and in the hands of the people who need it.”

Additional challenges occur depending on the specific application of Ursa Major’s technology. For example, take in-orbit maneuverability for lengthy space missions, which is a critical yet complex function. Here, “one of the hardest parts is making sure that that propulsion system can work in a wide range of thermal conditions and over a long time period, measured in years or decades,” says Murray.

To face these challenges head-on, the Ursa Major team turned to simulation, working with Ansys Elite Channel Partner, PADT.

Propelling Ahead With Simulation

At Ursa Major, simulation acts as a sort of “guiding light,” says Thyes. The Ursa Major team uses Ansys software — including Ansys Mechanical structural finite element analysis software, Ansys CFX computational fluid dynamics software, and Ansys Fluent fluid simulation software — throughout its design and development process to increase efficiency in every part of its designs.

For example, simulation software enabled the team to iterate quickly before proceeding to the real-world testing stage, which requires purchasing costly hardware. “Simulation is really important for us because we want to be able to predict failures before we test something,” says Villa.

This way, Ursa Major can identify and understand potential issues before moving on to physical prototyping. “Simulation has been pivotal in making sure that we get really close to the final results on the first try,” Murray says.

This is particularly important for the complex problems Ursa Major works on, which involve working with many different materials with varying properties. As certain materials can cause issues if placed next to one another, “being able to recreate the environment and then the stresses that those different components see next to each other is very informative for our design process,” says Villa. Ansys simulation solutions enable Ursa Major to predict how components will interact with each other and then determine how to improve the performance of each individual component.

Simulation software can reduce costs in other ways, too, such as by enabling a streamlined team. “With modern software, we are able to reduce the number of people it takes to develop something, which means individuals can do way more than they used to be able to do,” Murray says. Customizing their simulation tools and analyses also “allows us to have a shared language when it comes to our analysis,” says Villa. “It allows anybody to look at the work that you did and […] understand the results and whether or not that component is going to work.”  

Simulation software proves especially valuable when designing for challenging missions, particularly those in space. “Generally, those problems can only be solved by analysis because you can't always test in space,” says Murray. “So, our analysis tools are really critical to making sure that the customer knows that our hardware will work, whether it's going from ground to space or staying in space for a long time.”

Throughout its history, Ursa Major has used simulation software to help pursue its vision. Ursa Major started with the goal of building a liquid rocket engine from scratch, and it achieved this with only six people. “That was only possible due to advanced software technologies,” says Murray. Today, simulation remains a critical tool for the Ursa Major team. “We wouldn't be where we are today without the computational power and the tools that we use to be able to develop engines as quickly as we do and as with as few people as we do,” says Villa.

How Ursa Major Is Growing and Adapting

When envisioning the future of Ursa Major, Villa sees two points of progression:

1. Continuing to advance its existing engine designs
2. Adapting its current engines or developing new ones to meet evolving market needs

One part of the latter goal will be adjusting to the growing space industry. “Space is the representation of a lot of great possibilities, exploration, and expansion,” says Murray. To keep pace with this growth potential, Ursa Major plans to expand its propulsion technology applications for new applications, like solid rocket motors.

As for achieving these goals, Ursa Major is very optimistic that these advancements will come to fruition.

“Over the next 10 years, I see Ursa Major providing engines for the growing both domestically and internationally,” says Murray.

Learn more about the how simulation is used in the space industry.